This chapter reviews my analytic approach, which draws from the theories and methods of media studies, sociology, and history. This framework is premised on understanding the emergence-‐-‐or rather, social construction-‐-‐of the brand-‐loyal child consumer through food advertising. First, I outline the challenges of theorizing children as consumers. Second, I turn to more specific theoretical “tools” that help frame how food advertisers conceptualized and represented children. Louis
Althusser’s concept of interpellation is used to theorize how advertisers attempted to position children as subjects to a branded consumer marketplace. I also discuss theories of audience commodification, which both frame how advertisers and commercial media constructed children as a valuable segment and spotlight the relationships between audiences, media, and advertisers. Finally, this chapter delineates key components of my method, such as selection of sources,
interpretation of sources, organization of material, and historiographical footings.
Theorizing Children’s Consumption
Challenges arise when the historical researcher is entirely immersed in data; the amount of archival material available can be overwhelming. This is why a
theoretical frame is integral for a successful analysis. Theory can both filter sources and help with the interpretation of them; hence, for this project, theory is an
“organizing principle.”1 William Neuman contends that it is “impossible to begin
1 Arthur A. Berger, Media and Communication Research Methods (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 140.
serious research without a framework of assumptions, concepts, and theory.”2
Neuman further suggests that, “the interaction of data and theory means that a researcher goes beyond a surface examination of the evidence to develop new concepts by critically evaluating the evidence based on theory.”3 Historical analysis
becomes problematically fact-‐centred and descriptive, a mere chronology, if the researcher does not have a theoretical framework. Discussing the role of theory in media history, Paul Rutherford recommends that researchers find the tools that meet their need for a “frame” and not worry about applying theory as “gospel.”4
Instead of debating about whether a theorist is “right” in all contexts, the media historian should look to theory as offering insights into how “people, their relations, and their artifacts operate in the world at large.”5
However, a lack of theoretical engagement is a problem within the recent scholarship on advertising to children. Cook argues that “scholars of children and consumer culture,” for the most part, “have not attempted to put their work in conversation with extant notions and theories of consumption generally.”6 For
example, much of the recent publishing on children neglects the insights of well-‐ established advertising and consumer culture theoretical works, derived from the likes of Karl Marx, Jean Baudrillard, Thorstein Veblen, or Pierre Bourdieu. Cook suggests, “children pose analytic, ontological and epistemological problems to the
2 William L. Neuman, Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, 3rd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997), 412.
3 Ibid, 414.
4 Paul Rutherford, “Encounters with Theory,” in Communicating in Canada’s Past: Essays in Media
History, eds. Gene Allen and Daniel J. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 279. 5 Ibid, 272.
theorizing of social action-‐-‐most any kind of social action, economic or otherwise-‐-‐ precisely because their agency, being-‐in-‐the-‐world and ways of knowing are at issue.”7 Children are unique social actors.
Furthermore, children often “co-‐consume” alongside their caregivers, while many critical theories of advertising and consumption presuppose individual social actors. Cook’s history of children’s clothing notes how appeals were first made to mothers.8 Similarly, Cross outlines how the toy industry in the twentieth century
leveraged the ways parents were becoming much more self-‐conscious about childrearing. A distinct “child-‐improvement” ethos emerged in the early 1900s; psychologists, magazines, and even government whitepapers wrote on the importance of having a playroom in the house.9 Just as some clothing and toy
advertisers sold parents on children’s goods, other advertisers appealed to children as a way to influence the spending habits of parents. Jacobson uncovers this early form of “pester power,” citing examples of magazines instructing kids how to best pitch to their parents. Magazines often couched these tactics in discourses about promoting “companionate family relations” and “father-‐son bonding.”10
As Cross argues, we must consider the “triad of the child, parent, and advertising.”11 Several scholars have successfully investigated children’s
7 Ibid.
8 Cook, Commodification of Childhood, 42.
9 Cross, Kids’ Stuff, 128. In this sense, children do not necessarily “become” consumers; instead, they are already expected as consumers prior to birth.
10 Jacobson, Raising Consumers, 52.
11 Gary Cross, “Valves of Desire: A Historian’s Perspective on Parents, Children, and Marketing,”
consumption while juggling these three parties. Ellen Seiter contends that
parenthood is always-‐already embedded in children’s consumer culture.12 Allison
Pugh’s interview research examines what children’s consumption means for parents. For example, Pugh observes that upper-‐class parents assert their social status by shielding their children from the excesses of “mass” consumer culture.13 On the
other hand, lower class parents indulge their children in advertised toys and fast food as a way to demonstrate their financial situation is not dire. The triad of the child, parent, and advertiser is certainly relevant for the history of food advertising. Advertisers, parents, and children were always in the equation. As chapter three traces, during the late 1920s and early 1930s food advertisers re-‐arranged the relationship between parents and children. Instead of parents “pushing” branded foods on their children, advertisers trained children to “pull” for those brands.
Works on children and consumer culture too often fall at the extremes of a polarized debate, generalizing all children as either “empowered” or “exploited.”14
The works of Benjamin Barber, Kline, Susan Linn, Neil Postman, Alissa Quart, and Juliet Schor, among others, emphasize the power of the mediated marketplace and approach children as a vulnerable audience preyed upon by advertisers.15
12 Seiter, Sold Separately, 3.
13 See Pugh, Longing and Belonging, 119.
14 Buckingham, “Selling Childhood,” 15-‐24. See also Cook, “Dichotomous Child” for an overview of this debate.
15 Benjamin Barber, Con$umed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow
Citizens Whole (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); Kline, Out of the Garden; Susan Linn, Consuming Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood (New York: New Press, 2004); Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Delacorte Press, 1982); Alissa Quart, Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003); Juliet Schor, Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture (New York: Scribner, 2004); and Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe, ed., Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of Childhood (Boulder, CO: WestviewPress, 1997).
Conversely, other scholars criticize laments about the “death of childhood” and instead focus on how young audiences actively resist, adopt, and use branded messages. David Buckingham condemns the way in which some researchers on the “exploitation” side define children by what they cannot do.16 In a similar vein, Sarah
Banet-‐Weiser argues Nickelodeon’s “kid power” branding fosters a valuable form of active consumer-‐citizenship that complicates notions of commercialized
childhood.17 There are problems with both extremes of this debate. Consistent with
decades-‐old debates in cultural studies, while critiques of exploitation may
presuppose an overly simplistic view of advertising power, theorizing an audience as empowered is equally problematic because it aligns, perhaps uncomfortably, with media industry discourses.
Hence, interesting-‐-‐though admittedly challenging-‐-‐research lies in theorizing the political-‐economic power of advertising while not neglecting contexts or points of resistance. Dealing with both structure and agency is important, as historical research “attempts to systematically recapture the complex nuances, the people, meanings, events, and even ideas of the past.”18 As this chapter concedes, my
approach is biased towards the advertising industry’s attempt to foster young, brand-‐loyal consuming subjects. Nonetheless, throughout this dissertation I write about the political-‐economic power of early twentieth century food advertisers without falling into arguments that they were monolithic propagandists who
16 David Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood: Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000), 13.
17 See Sarah Banet-‐Weiser, Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
exploited an otherwise-‐innocent childhood. I do not assume that any individual advertisement had a direct effect on desires or purchases. Instead, I draw attention to the cumulative social construction of the child consumer. I also provide evidence, for example, of early marketing experts cautioning advertisers to scale back their efforts. Finally, I suggest that advertising food to children proliferated in a particular time and place; a variety of mediating institutions and socio-‐cultural contexts were also responsible for the rise of advertising (food) to children.
Theoretical Tools: Representing the Child Consumer
Central to my interest in early children’s advertising is the process by which food advertisers not only started pitching products directly to young people, but also advanced the very notion of children as desiring and demanding consumers. The previous chapter described how contemporary public health debates surrounding advertising food to children are “ahistorical.” I consider them ahistorical in the sense that they focus on specific advertising practices and do not see the deeper historical significance of food advertising: food advertising was actually responsible for birth of a certain articulation of the “child consumer.” My work foregrounds how food producers, while pursuing their individual business goals during the first half of the twentieth century, socially constructed, represented, and naturalized the “demanding” and “brand-‐loyal child consumer.”
A social constructionist perspective, such as the one proposed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, offers an appropriate position with which to approach this
phenomenon.19 The social constructionist epistemology steers between extreme
objectivism (positivism) and subjectivism (relativism). According to Berger and Luckmann, we make sense of our complex world through institutionalized ways of thinking and socially constructed language, typifications, habitualizations, and roles. This perspective recognizes that we socially construct the reality of everyday life, but this socially constructed reality acts back on us in ways that are very much real and material. Hence, the brand-‐loyal child consumer is an entirely socially
constructed subject position, a shared “reality” that exists in the minds of the business community, but this does not push me down the slippery slope of relativism, because the financial burdens parents carry and the consequences for food production or the economic structure of mass media are certainly very “real.” Two conceptual tools help with specific aspects of the social construction process: the theory of interpellation and theories concerning the audience-‐as-‐commodity.20
Both of these frames deal with how abstract ways of thinking about children are expressed, naturalized, and reified, through advertising.
Althusser’s theory of “interpellation” offers a point of departure to understand how early advertisers first recognized and positioned the child as a certain kind of subject; a cornerstone in the social construction of the brand-‐loyal child consumer. Althusser’s theory of ideology concerns “ideological state apparatuses,” which are supported by a number of non-‐state institutions, such as religion, education, families,
19 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the
Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966).
20 These two theories correspond with the latter two of my three research questions, as presented in chapter one.
trade unions, media, and culture.21 These ideological state apparatuses lack central
control and function (relatively) autonomously compared to a repressive state; yet, they too play a key role in ensuring the effective reproduction of the dominant relations over time.22 For Althusser, ideology does not just exist in minds; instead,
semi-‐autonomous material institutions, including advertising, support it.
Additionally, ideology is realized in habits, rituals, and behaviours that appear to be free and voluntary-‐-‐such as a child demanding to have one brand of cereal. This submission happens through a process of “hailing” specific kinds of subjects, or “interpellation.” Althusser famously posited, “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject.”23
Judith Williamson’s Decoding Advertisements is a foundational study of advertising semiotics that draws heavily on the concept of interpellation.
Williamson discusses how advertisements “create an ‘alreadyness’ of ‘facts’ about ourselves as individuals.”24 For Williamson, interpellation requires an exchange
between the reader as an individual and the “imaginary subject addressed by the ad.”25 What is interesting about this exchange is how advertising addresses different
people as a singular, unified, imaginary subject. In this research, I pay close attention to how advertisements addressed children as the unified subject of the
21 Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 96.
22 Ibid, 100-‐104. 23 Ibid, 117.
24 Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (London: Marion Boyars, 1978), 42. Williams uses the term “appellation” instead of interpellation.
brand-‐loyal and demanding consumer; this was precisely the “subject position” that food advertisers envisioned starting at the end of the 1920s.
Although Williamson studies print advertisements, the interpellation of subjects is constituted in and through discourse. Althusser’s work remains relevant for the critical analysis of all media texts, including sponsored radio programs, because they can also be read as speech acts that attempt to position their audiences as unified subjects. Addressing children as unified consuming subjects lays an important foundation for consumer socialization, a term defined in the previous chapter. Before children could be “socialized” to the more specific practices of branded consumption, advertisers had to both recognize and discursively address their young audience members in such a way that children recognized their “role” as a certain kind of subject. Advertising food to children soared when these advertisers recognized children as consuming subjects, and then spoke to them as such.
Kylie Valentine sees Althusser’s work as an important-‐-‐though certainly less optimistic-‐-‐way to theorize the “agency” of children. Rather than describing children acting autonomously, Valentine sees agency as “inflected with power” and
“constituted by the social.”26 On this note, Althusser’s theory of interpellation can be
criticized for creating a kind of “top-‐down” functionalism. Advertising audiences, as subjects to the ideology of consumer culture, are not afforded any power to resist. Narrowly read, the theory of interpellation assumes a kind of one-‐way ideological indoctrination. But this is not how I use Althusser. I do not assume all children were
indoctrinated, as subjects, by food advertisers during the first half of the twentieth century. In fact, children may have ignored the “hail” of food advertisers altogether. In this dissertation, Althusser’s focus on the category of the subject says more about advertising as an institution-‐-‐as an agent of socialization that seeks to produce
certain habits, rituals, and behaviours-‐-‐than it does about advertising’s actual “effect” on children or their families.27 I use Althusser’s theory of interpellation (or
“hailing”) as a specific conceptual tool to locate the subject of the brand-‐loyal and demanding child consumer as a business ideal. There is precedent in the literature for this specific use of Althusser. Cook, whose work also concerns how businesses conceptualized childhood, cites Althusser to show how the clothing industry, particularly at the retail level, (re)produced children as consuming subjects.28
In this work, the concept of interpellation offers an organizing principle to identify, group, and theorize the importance of advertising efforts that attempted to position children as subjects. In this sense, interpellation helps to highlight an important transition in food advertising. I cannot argue that food advertisers “discovered” the profitability of children, for food companies advertised to parents with pitches concerning the “health of children” since the late nineteenth century. Rather, what is noteworthy about the period of this study is how advertisers
directly addressed children as consuming subjects. A significant shift occurred when food producers attempted to hail children as desiring, demanding subjects. Second,
27 Despite this disclaimer, successful sales numbers and “audience metrics” (for example, returned box tops for special offers) demonstrate that food advertisers were, in many cases, successful in reaching children as demanding, consuming subjects.
interpellation is useful to highlight how food advertisers sought a unique subject: the brand-‐loyal child consumer. Other manufacturers, though limited compared to food, advertised to children in the first half of the twentieth century. Sporting goods and toy marketers may have also addressed children as consumers, but food
advertisers were unique in discursively positioning audiences as brand-‐conscious and brand-‐loyal subjects.
However, children were not only subjects hailed by the market; they were also objects placed on the market. This brings me to a second set of conceptual tools that help elucidate the social construction of the child consumer: “audience commodity” theories. During my period of study, commercial media and food advertisers
extensively researched, valorized, and exchanged (in an abstract form) child audiences for the first time. Several media and communication scholars have discussed how media audiences are imagined groups and a kind of commodity that is produced, packaged, and sold for profit.
In the late 1970s Dallas Smythe introduced the idea of the audience commodity, suggesting that the “true” product produced by commercial media is not
programming, but rather, an audience to sell off to advertisers.29 Smythe argued that
29 Dallas Smythe, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” Canadian Journal of Political
and Social Theory 1 (1977): 1-‐27. Admittedly, Althusser’s theory of interpellating subjects is rarely combined with Smythe’s theory of the audience commodity. Smythe launched this debate in direct response to Marxists being too concerned about media’s ideological impact. In other words, he contributed the audience commodity framework to move away from Althusserian-‐like analyses of discourse, semiotics, and ideology. However, what links both Althusser and Smythe in my research is that they both offer theoretical tools to understand issues of representation-‐-‐how businesses
constructed the child consumer. To reiterate, this dissertation concerns the social construction of the brand-‐loyal child consumer by food advertisers. These advertisers had an interest in children as subjects, but through this, measured, discussed, and exchanged children as audience commodities.
Marxists were too often fixated on the ideological content of media and neglected the material conditions in which surpluses are derived from selling audiences to advertisers. Readers, listeners, and viewers can be “commodities,” and specifically, commodities that labour. Audiences are valuable to advertisers, Smythe argues, because they perform a kind of abstract labour: they “work” to create a demand for branded goods in monopoly capitalism. In this sense, Smythe’s work is also
consistent with the notion of consumer socialization. Advertisers purchase audience